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I Like the Teaching Company

One of my favorite "discoveries" of this past year was the "Teaching Company." Over the years, I had seen their ads, but it had never dawned on me that I would become a consumer of their recorded products.

That changed when two things happened:

1) My son Alex gave me an iPod for Christmas in 2005, and I discovered I loved listening to podcasts; and

2) I was taking a class on the human brain in February, and one of the students said, "Hey everybody, Sapolsky's series is on sale." He was referring to the eminent Stanford neuro-biologist Robert Sapolsky and the 24 part Teaching Company program on the brain ("The Neurological Origins of Individuality").

I went to their site and found that I could download it in MP4 format for $35.95. I was immediately hooked. Sapolsky's great, the series was well-produced, and I learned a lot. My wife, daughter, and son also downloaded it at no extra cost — so in effect it cost us each $9 for 12 hours of learning.

But that was just the beginning. I listened to a 36 part "History of Science in the 20th Century" flying to and from Hong Kong. Next came a 36 part series on the basics of Economics.

Here's a really neat thing: since this is the Internet, you can download these programs anywhere (well, duh!). When I was in Japan, I finished up one series and wanted another for the flight home. I simply got another program on Classical Mythology (only 5 minutes to download with a fast connection).

This past summer, when I was in working in my shop making prototypes for the follow-on product to the Ball of Whacks, I listened to several more programs: one on Nietzsche, another on Cultural Patterns in Anthropology, and still another one on Great Books. My hands and eyes were busy, but these programs gave me additional mental stimulation.

I just finished a 32 part program on Bach by Robert Greenberg who is an extremely talented educator (and composer). I've had a life-long love affair with Bach, and Professor Greenberg deepened my affection for his music. I highly recommend him.

My wife and I are going to Egypt in early February, and so we're currently listening to a program on ancient Egyptian History and Culture.

If you've listened to programs from the Teaching Company, I'd like to know which ones you would recommend. Thanks!

i have enjoyed:
"Science Wars"
Yao to Mao: 5000 yrs of Chinese history
The joy of thinking
The effective argumentation
tools of thinking
Calculus
Statistics made simple
Probability
Great Ideas of Philosophy

Hi,
my wife and I are 86 and 87 respectively. We own 22 lectures on DVD. We started with Human Anatomy, the Astronomy - and we were hooked. What a company. We buy DVDs because of graphics and also we want to watch the lecturers. Some are a show of their own. Prof. Pollock comes to mind (Particle Physics).My wife grew up in Germany at a time when girls only needed to know how to darn socks. Now she is catching up. And life is not over at 87.

Definitely Daniel Robinson's Great Ideas of Philosophy. He is an excellent lecturer--highly precise in his wording and engaging--and any one of his lectures could be transcribed to make a wonderful essay. Ever the psychologist, also (he was trained in neurophysiology), he never fails to tie the topics in to real historical and contemporary issues. Simply fantastic. I've learned easily as much from his series as from almost any of the courses I've taken in school, and as a student of cognitive science and philosophy he's been a great resource.

Hi!
I discovered the Teaching Company lectures with Classics of Russian Literature and was very impressed.
I kept on listening on the bus on the way to my office all year long:

- Great Ideas in Philosophy (amazing for philosophy newbies like me)
- Philosophy and religion in the West (most of it is AWESOME)
- From Plato to Postmodernism (by great,great teacher Louis Markos)
- Rise and fall of Soviet Comunism (a rather conservative but very good teacher)
- Introduction to Greek Philsophy

I listened to a couple others i didn´t enjoy as much.
The most prominent feature of the lectures is that they don´t require reading, so they´re pretty light. For more deep courses, you gotta go to the university websites (webcast.berkeley.edy, yale, etc), where they broadcast lectures. You gotta read to follow this ones though.

This was a really quality post. In theory I'd like to write like this too - taking time and real effort to make a good article... but what can I say... I procrastinate alot and never seem to get something done.